Should U.S. colleges be graded by the government?

摘要

You'll Be Forgiven If You've never heard of Lesley University. The small, private liberal-arts school exists almost literally in the shadow of Harvard, scattered across a handful of brick buildings and Victorian mansions in Cambridge, Mass. With only 1,650 undergraduates and a Division Ⅲ sports program, Lesley rarely makes headlines. But lately its president, Joseph Moore, has been making some noise. What's got him going is President Obama's plan to assign an official government rating to every college and university in the country, from tiny faith-based schools to giant state flagships, and then allocate federal financial aid according to those ratings. "When I first heard about the plan, I thought, Holy smokes," Moore says, "what kind of scientific nightmare are we getting ourselves into here?"